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Comment by Improvotter | Hacker News Reader

Am I wrong to think that Thunderbird development still seems so slow? As far as I understand, they put a new team in charge. But since January this is the first new release and it doesn't look like much has been added/changed:

- New app menu

- Preferences in a tab

- "Full color support"

- Better dark theme

- Attachment management

- "Filelink improved"

I've been using Thunderbird for a few years now and I still feel like it's just not as good intuitive as for example Apple Mail. You need addons to have proper threading support, it looks so ugly on anything but Linux (as it's a GTK app so you can change it), Exchange support is lackluster (I get constant disconnect messages even though it's fine just minutes later), and just generally using it is not convenient which I cannot even begin to describe.

I'd love to pay for Thunderbird if it makes for a proper development cycle with fresh updates that are actually useful.

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Holy freaking cow - please no to this, and no to the thread below about "old annoying UI." Thunderbird is a workhorse. I process over 15,000 mails per quarter - manually. I write a lot, I read a lot, and Thunderbird is my home sweet home every day since the time I've left The Bat! at version 3 something. (The Bat is awesome as well but exists only for Windows...)

Thunderbird is the best e-mail client out there. It doesn't need a new UI, colors, animations, apps or any other bells and whistles. It looks great on Mac and BSD. Please, people, don't vote for it to be yet another Apple Mail or another "Web 2.0" or whatever is now considered cool or hip. I don't need that shit. I need a stable standard client that can handle Gigabytes of e-mail without corrupting files. I can rsync my own shit to back it up. I love being able to dig into custom settings manually. I can manage stuff myself. There are others people like me. Just don't get into my way and turn my computer into your computer.

Sorry, this has to be said. Thunderbird is awesome. Cheers, peace and love.

Well, Thunderbird has been taken over by people who aim at 2 goals:

* replace internals with more Web tech (I say more, because Thunderbird unfortunately already used some);

* 'modernize' the interface.

So you can abandon all hopes and regret the time it was supposedly unmaintained.

Will there be forks? I remember Phoenix forked from Firefox. 0.99 was awesome, then Phoenix became Firefox after they overloaded the browser with crap.

Phoenix forked from Netscape Navigator 6. The renaming to Firebird and then Firefox were entirely about trademark conflicts.

I wholeheartedly agree - Thunderbird is awesome, one of my favorite programs out of the ones I use daily, and has worked well for me for over a decade. I know of no alternative that is suitable for me.

While there is a bit of room for improvement, I dread the types of changes to Thunderbird that are so often discussed. Now that a generation has been raised on webmail, it seems that very few even understand the many benefits of Thunderbird or why someone would not want webmail.

I'm not the right person to try to teach people about the benefits of Thunderbird or educate them on why webmail is a scourge. Thank you for your comment - at least it will help people start to realize that there might be a silent majority out there like us that find great utility in Thunderbird and that aren't looking for a Gmail clone or a copy of the Apple equivalent.

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Edit: fixed typo.

I wholeheartedly agree with you. I'm not using another email client because I don't want a dumbed down version. I simply want a less buggy and faster feeling Thunderbird. Just some polish here and there.

There are commercial email clients based on Thunderbird who fix some of the issues. https://www.postbox-inc.com/ for example

For Exchange support you'd need the OWL addon. Sounds like you should stay on Apple Mail.

There's also davmail

I use Thunderbird on Linux.

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